Condi Rice Just Helped Dropbox's Competitors

The jaw-dropping decision to appoint Bush-era Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Dropbox's board has many of us in tech simply shaking our heads in incredulity.

This isn't all about politics. Let's forget for a moment that Rice was an integral part of team George W. Bush, which had no issue storming into another nation and starting a war under the false pretense that "weapons of mass destruction" existed in that country.

Also, we'll not dwell on Ms. Rice's defense of torture methods like waterboarding in dealing with prisoners.

Rice is such a controversial figure than faculty at Rutgers University earlier this year protested the institution's plan to award her an honorary doctorate degree as well as giving a commencement address.

Instead, focus on the fact that Rice was involved with the Patriot Act, which since its implementation, has evoked endless scrutiny, criticism—and some may even say, paranoia— about our government and surveillance over citizens. Particularly, surveillance over our digital lives.

Regardless of one's position on surveillance, the Patriot Act and the host of other issues surrounding privacy, it is mindboggling that a tech company that wants to reassure you, above anything else, that your data is safe, would even consider Rice a suitable candidate to sit on its board.

In all fairness, Rice sits or has sat on plenty of large corporations' boards. The most notable in tech is Hewlett-Packard.

However, Dropbox is not Hewlett-Packard. Dropbox's primary service is cloud storage. Which means reassuring customers of data security and privacy is essential.

You have to wonder if this announcement ties in with Dropbox's new business services, which include beefed-up collaboration and IT management tools. Perhaps the thinking at Dropbox is that having uber-sucessful Republican darling Rice on the board will make Dropbox positively irresistible to the business community?

Perhaps it's because Dropbox founder Drew Houston was not even of legal drinking age when the war in Iraq began and has little recollection of the massive lie told by the Bush administration to get this nation on board with that war?

Whatever the reason for this surprising appointment, one thing is for sure—Dropbox competitors including Microsoft's OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, and the rest of the many cloud storage and online backup solutions out there dying to be entrusted with your data, are elated.

Samara Lynn has nearly twenty years experience in Information Technology; most recently as IT Director at a major New York City healthcare facility. She has a Bachelor's degree from Brooklyn College, several technology certifications, and she was a tech editor for the CRN Test Center.
With an extensive, hands-on background in deploying and managing Microsoft Windows infrastructures and networking, she was included in Black Enterprise's "20 Black Women in Tech You Need to Follow on Twitter," and received the 2013 Small Business Influencer Top 100 Champions...
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